jonathan's coffeehouse turns into the london stock exchange. so coffeehouses turned out to be in the great place where you mix people and ideas up, and tsa what the internet does by allowing people of different places to meet virtually and to exchange ideas. >> host: tom standage, when you look back to 1969, that first internet message to today, the growth and the change in what we know as the internet, is it faster than in the past? >> guest: yes. it's definitely faster. so i have to, you know, be straightforward about this. modern social media is, obviously, operates on a scale and at a speed that is unprecedented in history. so it's global, it's instant, it's searchable, it may be permanent. we don't know how permanent which it is, that's sort of our open question at the moment. so that is definitely unprecedented. but the idea that social media environments have never occurred before is not unprecedented. they have existed for many centuries, and even though there are these differences, the analogy is close enough that it's extremely inform